A discovery gives experts new ideas for developing vaccines to treat or even prevent cancer.
Relics of ancient viruses - that have spent millions of years hiding inside human DNA - help the body fight cancer, say scientists.
B-cells are the part of our body that manufactures antibodies and are better known for their role in fighting off infections, such as Covid. Some of these retroviruses became a fixture of our genetic code tens of millions of years ago and are shared with our evolutionary relatives, the great apesSome of these foreign instructions have, over time, been co-opted and serve useful purposes inside our cells, but others are tightly controlled to stop them spreading.
"The immune system is tricked into believing that the tumour cells are infected and it tries to eliminate the virus, so it's sort of an alarm system," Prof George Kassiotis, head of retroviral immunology at the biomedical research centre, told me. "If we can do that, then you can think not only of therapeutic vaccines, you can also think of preventative vaccines," said Prof Kassiotis.
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